Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved
like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have
behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like
ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the
strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that
this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million),
has now a population of barely two hundred persons.
The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there
to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then,
when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure,
that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only
the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or
beast), they enslave any survivors. With these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless
numbers of those pitiful Indian nations.... Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of
souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in
a very brief time.... And never have the Indians in all the Indies committed any act against the Spanish
Christians, until those Christians have first and many times committed countless cruel aggressions against
them or against neighboring nations. For in the beginning the Indians regarded the Spaniards as angels from
Heaven. Only after the Spaniards had used violence against them, killing, robbing, torturing, did the Indians
ever rise up against them.
Part A
What is Las Casas describing in this passage?